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About this artwork

Bernat Martorell was the greatest painter of the first half of the fifteenth century in Catalonia in northeastern Spain. Depicted here is the most frequently represented episode from the popular legend of Saint George, in which the model Christian knight saves a town and rescues a beautiful princess. Conceived in the elegant, decorative International Gothic style, the painting was originally the center of an altarpiece dedicated to Saint George that was apparently made for the chapel of the palace of the Catalan government in Barcelona. This central scene was surrounded by four smaller narrative panels, now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and was probably surmounted by a lost image of Christ on the Cross. Here Saint George, on his white steed, triumphs over the evil dragon. A wealth of precisely observed details intensifies the drama. Dressed in an ermine-lined robe, the princess wears a sumptuous gilt crown atop her wavy red-gold hair. Her parents and their subjects watch the spectacle from the distant town walls. George’s halo and armor and the scaly body of the dragon are richly modeled with raised stucco decoration. Martorell also treated the ground, littered with bones and crawling with lizards, in a lively manner, giving it a gritty texture.

Art Institute of Chicago, A Century of Progress, 1933, no. 178 (ill.).

Art Institute of Chicago, A Century of Progress, 1934, no. 78.

Art Institute of Chicago, Masterpiece of the Month, July 1939 (no cat.).

The Art Institute of Chicago, New Light on Old Masters: Research on Northern European and Spanish Paintings before 1600 in the Art Institute, 26 June—14 September 2008, no cat.

Probably commissioned for the chapel of Saint George, Palau de la Generalitat, Barcelona [Sobré in Wolff 2008]; Don Francesc de Sales de Rocabruna i Jordà, Baron of Albi, by 1867, died 1874 [lent by him to Barcelona 1867, along with the four lateral panels now in the Louvre, Paris, and a painting of the Virgin, probably the painting now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art]; when his estate was divided between his sister Maria Josepa de Rocabruna i Jordà (d. 1890) and his widow Josepa de Rocabruna i Pascual (died 1884), Saint George and the Dragon is likely to have passed to his widow, since two of her three executors correspond to the executors mentioned in the confused account of the painting’s sale in Sanpere y Miquel 1906, vol. 1, p. 195, vol. 2, p. 275 [see Macías and Cornudella 2011-2012, pp. 21-22 for the family relationships and likely transmission]. Don José Ferrer-Vidal i Soler, Barcelona, by 1906, until 1917 [Sanpere y Miquel 1906, vol. 1, p. 194, see also Macías and Cornudella 2012, p. 22 and Sánchez Sauleda 2014, p. 429]; sold by him to Charles Deering, Marycel, Sitges, near Barcelona, and Chicago, in 1917 [see Sánchez Sauleda 2014]; the painting was placed on loan at the Art Institute in 1921; loan agreement, Nov. 18, 1921, Art Institute Archives]; given to his daughters, Marion Deering McCormick and Barbara Deering Danielson, 1924 [Art Institute Archives]; given by them to the Art Institute, 1933.